"Our work with lensless smart sensors through the POD program is helping to pave the way for innovations that are sure to inspire and become ubiquitous throughout our lives," said Andrew Zimmerman, president of frog. "The opportunity to partner with Rambus, through our R&D platform frogLabsTM and other organizations, to build out the burgeoning sensor ecosystem means we are helping to propel solutions that can be adopted much more quickly."

"Opening its innovative lensless smart technology to the developer community enables Rambus to promote what promises to be a robust, intelligent ecosystem around this new approach to sensing and imaging," said Dr. Reto Wettach, founder and design director with IXDS. "We are proud to be among the inaugural POD partners and look forward to being among the first contributors to identify and expand upon existing IoT-based applications for this technology."

The Rambus lensless smart sensor technology consists of spiral grating diffractive optics and computational algorithms that enable reduced computation times and superior design flexibility, delivering more data and improved accuracy versus current sensors comparable in size, power and cost. The combination of spiral grating diffractive optics and computational algorithms provide high fidelity output for greater accuracy and more sophisticated capabilities in the areas of gesture recognition, depth and range tracking, point finding and advanced object recognition.

"With the need for smart sensors growing, our engineers have invented novel ways to become the eyes of the IoT," said Gary Bronner, vice president of Rambus Labs. "Our Partners-in-Open-Development provides a great opportunity for innovators to develop technology for a smarter world. With this program, we encourage developers across the globe to join in to create new products that introduce real-world IoT applications that will touch so many parts of our lives. This is the first step toward expanding the accessibility of an ecosystem that will foster a new generation of innovation."

As part of the POD program, Rambus has identified four key verticals to accelerate and amplify discovery of smart applications, which include cities, transportation, manufacturing and medical. To learn more about Rambus, lensless smart sensors and the Partners-in-Open-Development program, visit rambus.com/smartsensors.